


Eskimo

by MrsWhozeewhatsis (OxfordCommaLover)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s05e22 Swan Song, Gen, Swan Song
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-28
Updated: 2018-06-28
Packaged: 2019-05-29 17:47:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15078386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordCommaLover/pseuds/MrsWhozeewhatsis
Summary: Chuck is challenged by his editor while he’s writing the final chapter of The Winchester Gospel.





	Eskimo

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first submission for the 2018 Louden Swain Fanfic Fanart Project! This is such a tough song to interpret, and I’ve enjoyed reading the other fics for this song from the past two years. I got a feeling about it a few months ago and decided I wanted to attack it this year. Special thanks to @oriona75 who took my babbling about free will vs. destiny and centered it in a season of the show. Mega beta thanks to @littlegreenplasticsoldier @manawhaat and @andromytta who all read this and ripped it up like I asked them to. Ali, in particular, helped me build a whole backstory for her, which I ended up not even using. Such is writing, I guess. Please, let me know if you find any errors or have feedback! I’m always extra nervous about the ones Rob will read! Thanks!

While Chuck stammers his way through an explanation of who Mistress Magda is, you pick up the messy notepad where he jots down his notes. You can hear Dean through the phone line, telling Chuck how Sam had said yes to Lucifer, his voice barely a croak- tense and nearly broken. As Chuck gives Dean the information he needs to find his brother, you read through the outline, hearing Chuck’s lie as he says it.

“I wish that I did. But I-I just—I honestly don’t know, yet.”

The bottom of the page in your hand says differently. _Dean is left alone to bury the remains of his best friend, his surrogate father, and the memory of his fallen brother. Only his guilt at failing everyone stays by his side._ Your breath catches and your eyes sting.

Chuck hangs up the phone, the sound igniting righteous fury in your chest.

“Liar!!” you accuse, blinking away tears.

Chuck doesn’t deny it. His gaze is steady, his breath even, though his eyes are sad when they meet yours. “You’re right. But he doesn’t need to know in advance what’s coming. Knowing won’t change anything.”

Slamming the notepad on the table, you shoot him your fiercest glare. “But you could. You could change all of it. With just a thought, you could cage Lucifer. Even better, you could change him! Make him the good and righteous leader he was supposed to be!” Stabbing the air near him with your finger, you finish your rant with, “You MADE this happen, and you can unmake it just as easily!”

Chuck simply frowns as your chest rises with emotion. He pours himself another glass of whiskey, letting the bottle hit the table a bit harder than it needs to.

“Hey, you created me for this. Don’t go getting mad when I do my job,” you grumble.

Chuck sighs. “I know. I just didn’t expect you to be so good at it,” he says, chuckling wryly into his glass.

The two of you sit across from each other at the table, his computer partially obscuring your view of him, just glaring at each other. He drinks again, grimacing at the burn he probably doesn’t feel. He’s been playing at being human for so long, he sometimes forgets, even when in the middle of an argument about his own divinity.

“You have put those poor boys through Hell, literal Hell—with a capital H—in Dean’s case, and now you’re just going to condemn Sam to more literal Hell, and leave Dean all alone to stew in the hell of his own mind?” You shake your head and huff. “You really are a fucking bastard sometimes, you know that?”

He pulls in a deep breath, telling you without words that you’ve angered him.

Good. That’s your job. He wanted someone who would question him, challenge him, help him fix the little errors along the way so he’d be better. If you didn’t piss him off at least three times a day, you weren’t doing it right.

“You know why I can’t just fly in there and make everything the way you want it. That’s not how it works.” His voice sounds so calm, completely belying the wrath you know is simmering underneath.

“ _You decide how it works, Chuck!_ That’s the benefit of being big God on campus! You can do whatever the hell you want!!” Your voice is nowhere near as calm as his.

Chuck’s anger is felt in the air, raising all the little hairs on your body before his words are even spoken. He stands up from his seat, trying to tower over you at least a little bit to enforce his superiority. “Two words,” he says, pointing two fingers into the air. “ ** _Free_** _,_ ” he ticks off one finger, “ ** _will_** _,_ ” he finishes, ticking off the other finger. He flops back down into his chair, still glaring at you, and empties his glass. You wonder why he insists on drinking when he never gets drunk, but that’s an argument for another day.

“Have you ever played a game against yourself?” he questions, leaning forward in his chair. “You know, set up a chess board and just flipped it around for every move?”

You throw him one of the epic bitch faces you learned from Sam Winchester. “I’ve never had the chance, you know, because I’m always with _you!_ ” you reply, pursing your lips to let your irritation really sink in.

He slumps for a second. “Yeah, okay. Fair point.” Waving a hand, he continues, “Just know that it sucks. You already know all the moves the other player is going to make because you _are_ the other player. If I go down there and just poof everything, then I take away everything that makes them who they are. It would just be me, pushing empty pieces around on a chess board.”

Your shoulders slump because you know he’s right. _Dammit._

With a sigh, you stand up and move around the kitchen, making yourself a cup of tea while he returns to his typing. Tea will do as much for you as Chuck’s whiskey does for him, but you’d learned that the action of making the tea was as soothing for you as what you imagined the actual tea would be for someone else. Your thoughts swirl, but calm a bit as you sit down and stir, watching the water grow darker.

As you think, you stare into the eddies in your cup while the clacking of his keyboard washes over you like a steady stream. Your mind turns the problem over and over again, looking for the loophole, looking for the chink in the armor. Dean and Sam Winchester charmed you from the first page of The Winchester Gospel and meeting them had only increased your affections. Chuck made you with an extra serving of heart, and you happily gave it to those boys.

“Why can’t you just, I don’t know, nudge some of the pieces every now and then?” You catch yourself actually pouting, and pull your bottom lip back into line. Pouting and whining is beneath you and won’t help you convince him.

The flow of words into the computer stops and Chuck sighs again. “I do. You know I do. I whisper in their ears, I put obstacles in their way, making them turn left instead of right, and I put things they need where they can find them. I nudge all the damn time, but in the end, they do it their way.”

You know he’s right. Lately, he’s done more than just nudge. Cas could have ended up in the middle of a mountain after that stunt he pulled taking out five angels in Van Nuys, but Chuck made sure he landed somewhere relatively safe. Before that, even though Lucifer was freed, Chuck still cleaned up Sam and put both brothers on that plane, far away from the devil. Not to mention bringing Cas back after Raphael smote the crap out of him.

“You know, I used to actually try and talk to people,” Chuck says, staring into his glass. “I talked to Joan of Arc. I told her what would happen if she kept on her path. I told her she didn’t have to. There were other ways. She did it, anyway.”

Chuck’s face is pensive. His stare is completely unfocused in his glass, the swirls seeming to mesmerize him. After a long moment, he glances around the room without really seeing it, gives half a shrug, puts down his glass, and shifts back to look at the computer screen.

“It sounds like you’re saying you couldn’t even talk Lucifer or Michael or the Winchesters out of doing this tomorrow. Do you really think you’re that powerless without using your powers?” Leaning forward, you tap his glass to get him to look back at you. “Do you really think that Michael and Lucifer wouldn’t stop if you told them to?”

For a moment, you see immeasurable sadness in Chuck’s eyes. The force of his despair hits you like a wave in the ocean, the undertow threatening to drag you under with it. Before the feeling of drowning can do more than steal a gasp from you, it’s gone, and you can breathe again.

“I’ve been around the world a few times, now. I’ve watched humans learn and adapt, and the more they think they know, the less open they are to ideas that don’t fit their narrative. Sometimes, they’re like a polar bear who likes one cave more than another one, though the two are exactly the same. You’ll never get him into a cave that’s not his cave. Do you know that you can teach an Eskimo all about building skyscrapers with wood and steel, and they’ll take what you teach them and use snow and ice? Maybe it won’t look like the skyscraper you taught them about, but they’ll think it’s the best building ever built.

“Michael and Lucifer don’t even have half the open mind that that Eskimo and that polar bear have. They wouldn’t listen to anything short of me smiting the crap out of them. They’ll find some way to discredit me or what I’m saying so it fits their narrative, and they’ll end up killing each other, anyway.” He glances down at the pages you’d slammed on the table not so long ago. “I actually owe the Winchesters for finding a way to fix this mess that doesn’t kill absolutely everyone.”

Chuck sighs sadly and returns to his typing.

You, however, are not done.

“You’re right. You do owe them. You owe them big time. So, give them something back. You’ve done it before, you can do it again.”

Chuck raises one eyebrow and purses his lips. “But, it’s the _end_. Any good writer knows you have to tie everything up at the end.”

You raise your eyebrow to match his. “Is it? Really? Or is it a beginning of something else? This isn’t a book, it’s real life. Humans think death is the end, but it’s not, because there’s Heaven and there's Hell. So, yeah, maybe this is the end of the Apocalypse, but it’s not the end of everything.” You tilt your head and fold your hands on the table. “Is it?”

Chuck stares at you for a moment, gathering your words together in his mind, then looks down at his notes.

“You did it before, so do it again. Give them something back.”

He glances up at you one more time, mumbles, “I always think I know what you’re going to say, but you constantly surprise me,” then heads back to his typing with the barest hint of a smile on his face.

> _Endings are hard. Any chapped-ass monkey with a keyboard can poop out a beginning, but endings are impossible. You try to tie up every loose end, but you never can. The fans are always gonna bitch. There’s always gonna be holes. And since it’s the ending, it’s all supposed to add up to something. I’m telling you, they’re a raging pain in the ass._
> 
> _No doubt – endings are hard. But then again… nothing ever really ends, does it?_
> 
> _Dean kneels on the ground near the Impala, beaten and bloody, all desire to live having jumped into the Cage with his brothers and two asshole archangels. ‘This is the end,’ he thinks, a profound loneliness enveloping him as he considers the nearby remains of his best friend and surrogate father. ‘This is the end, so why am I still here? Why did I get to survive? What am I supposed to do, now, when everyone else is gone?’_
> 
> _No one is more surprised than him when Castiel appears next to him, standing tall with the sun shining behind him like a halo._

“Chapped-ass monkey with a keyboard, huh?” You give Chuck another one of Sam’s better bitch faces while marking up the page with your red pen, but he just shrugs and gives you a smug little smile that lingers long after you’ve left the table to reheat your tea.

 


End file.
